According to beer blogger Pete Brown, 2013 was the year craft beer went mainstream.
This is based on market research, his own experience and the fact that Hollywood has jumped on this beer-fuelled bandwagon with a rom-com, Drinking Buddies. With beer sales in decline and pubs closing, the big brewers are taking the craft movement seriously. Brown sees parallels with the music industry, where the major labels cashed in on indie music and left it a debased, meaningless term. Is craft beer destined for the same fate?
While the giants have started gobbling up craft breweries, Brown argues it is not about size or ownership, but intent. Do they want to help the sector grow with its integrity intact, or is it simply about making a fast buck until the next fad?
Molson Coors, whose brands include Carling, Coors and Cobra, has been edging its way into the market, buying the Cornish brewery Sharp's in 2011, and Ireland's Franciscan Well. A Scottish acquisition may be just around the corner. Hugo Mills, the firm's new sales and operations director for Scotland, says: "Three years ago, if a brewery had offered me a job I'd have turned my nose up. But there's been a massive cultural shift in the 'coolness' of beer. It's been like a tidal wave."
A few years back, Molson Coors seemed more interested in capturing the female beer market with its somewhat patronising Animée brand. Today, Mills talks of "an entrepreneurial shift where you're big, but act small."
The profusion of small, independent breweries in Scotland represents beer at its most dynamic, while the big lager brands look ever more stale. Mills accepts that "craft needs to be looked after and handled with cotton gloves", but feels the risk among small brewers is inconsistency from one brew to the next.
Meanwhile, I urge you to read Pete Brown's demolition job on the anti-alcohol lobby and its oft-repeated claim that booze costs society £21 billion a year, at petebrown.blogspot.co.uk.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article